


I got a lump in my throat cause you're gonna sing the words wrong

by Cirkne



Category: Now You See Me (Movies)
Genre: First Kiss, Getting Together, Multi, daniel has bpd
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-10
Updated: 2017-04-10
Packaged: 2018-10-17 08:44:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,046
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10590471
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cirkne/pseuds/Cirkne
Summary: It’s not like he wants them to love him.(He does).





	

**Author's Note:**

> rip my poly headcanons out of my cold dead hands
> 
> title from riptide by vance joy

She walks away a thousand times before she ever comes back. Or it feels like that, at least. She really only walks away once and Daniel starts thinking of himself as a product tester. The before and after of Henley Reeves, the beautiful escape artist. She slips away the moment he blinks and then she’s all over the internet because pretty girls get popular fast and because good magicians get popular fast too and she’s both and Daniel sticks to his cards, goes solo eventually because he’s better when he’s alone anyway.

*

The tricks, they-

Being a magician takes the magic out of everything that happens, he is always looking for explanations and nothing is ever bigger than him, Daniel thinks, and he doesn’t find out that he’s wrong until much, much later and the people around him love him, of course they do and maybe that goes to his head a bit. Maybe Henley goes to his head a bit. Maybe Henley’s been setting her first escape act up for years and he never noticed. The audience doesn’t notice her putting the key in her mouth and Daniel doesn’t notice the bags she packs right before she tells him. There’s a cruel joke about irony and him looking too close, watching her too intently. There’s a cruel joke about him throwing up in the bathroom of a hotel he just performed in, his phone buzzing on the tiles and his hair sticking to his forehead in sweat. There’s a cruel joke about her leaving and him not knowing how to deal with it when he always expected her to be the one that chases. 

*

There are people before and after her, of course. People that can’t wait to get his hands on them and he lets them because he’s never really been good at anything but his hands. There are scripts that follow him, scenes that play out every time he lets someone get closer. A thousand different scenarios and they all end in the same way: someone leaves. He never really learns that it’s best not to invite groupies into his own home, but he’s not really there much anyway so it doesn’t matter. 

He takes his coffee black from automated machines at malls and gas stations. Doesn’t actually like coffee. Doesn’t like the way it makes him jittery and sick in the pit of his stomach but there’s only so long you can run on barely any sleep without needing it.

He’s good at words, in a way. He’s good at banter and insults, good at quick-witted comments and sarcasm, good at tricking people. He’s bad at all the other parts. Bad at saying _please just stay I know I’m a dick and I can’t promise you to change but trust me I care about you, Henley, trust me, I don’t know how to tell you I care but I do_. 

He lies awake sometimes thinking of all the things he would tell her if she was here and wishes for her to show up in a fever dream just so he could get it all out of his system without actually opening up. 

*

He looks her up every day because self destruction has been etched into his bones since he chose magic as a career path. She’s doing good. Better than she could have if she had stayed. Eventually, her leaving starts making sense to him. Eventually, he moves on. Eventually-

There’s a card. A time and a place. There’s an image of a heart making fun of him in his hands. The one thing people tell him he doesn’t have.

He looks up the meaning of the lovers card in a taxi cab on his phone, his fingers jittery on the adrenaline of getting it. It’s about love, of course. It’s also about-

Henley is right in front of him, her coffee and card in the same hand. 

It’s about figuring out where you stand. About making a decision. 

She looks happier to see him than he would have expected her to. It probably means she hasn’t spent the last few years trying to get over him.

*

Daniel’s hands always open, wrists up for her to see, his sleeves up to his elbows. He’s saying:

_take me, take me, take me_ and she treats him like a wild animal she wants to catch, careful and cautious. In her mind he is there to hurt her and in his mind she is there-

She is here. She touches his shoulder when he’s bent over the plans at two am and says:

“They’ll be here tomorrow, Danny, just go to bed,” like they’re back to her being his assistant. Like they’re back to her knowing how his brain works. 

“I’m fine,” he says, warm on the feeling of her hand on his shoulder, her gloves and his shirt between them and then his skin between them. And isn’t it funny how even now when she’s back, she can never be close enough to him, how he wants her to touch his ribs before she touches anything else.

“You’re not,” she tells him, soft, quiet, raw. When he looks at her, she seems more tired than he is and yet she is here asking him to go to bed before she does and from the couch comes:

“Henley’s right. Go to bed, Daniel,” Merritt’s voice slow and tired. It sounds different than it would in the light of day when they are practicing and going over tricks again and again and Jack’s already asleep in his bedroom so there’s not much Daniel can do anyway besides think about everything again as if the plan they were given wasn’t already made perfect for them.

“Okay,” he says, mostly because if he listens to Henley now she has less of a reason to leave. She has- 

Once this is over. Once all of their big shows end. She- 

She looks tired, exhausted, barely has her eyes open. She can’t run away like this. Her hands are still covered in gloves. Daniel says:

“You should sleep too.” To the both of them, to himself. To the room at large. To the thoughts running through his head and his racing heart. 

*

He doesn’t know where to put his hands when he talks to her. To any of them, really. It’s not like he ever did. It’s not like there is a place for his fingers that’s not on a deck of cards. It’s not like there’s a place for his body at all. His too long limbs, his skinny frame, his heart that’s too big for his body. 

They’re eating take out from greasy paper containers on the dark red couch, Henley’s legs a bridge over Jack’s, toes digging into the side of Merritt’s thigh. Daniel watches them from the kitchen, a glass of water in his hands, waits anxiously for one of them to spill or drop something like he knows they will.

“You want some, Danny boy?” Merritt asks turning around to look at him over the back of the couch, pointing his food towards Daniel, wrinkles showing around his eyes.

“Danny has to see his food being made,” Henley answers for him, dismissively, stuffs a fried dumpling into her mouth, turns to look at him too as she’s chewing it. She remembers, of course. The same way he remembers her shampoo used to smell like lilacs, her father left when she was seven, she has trouble sleeping alone.

“We should go to that hibachi place around the corner, then,” Jack says. “Before the year is up and we probably end up in jail,” light, easy, like it’s a joke and not a possibility. They allow each other to pretend sometimes.

“Sure,” Merritt answers, shrugs. Daniel taps his glass, doesn’t stop watching them. Doesn’t stop even after they’ve eaten, even after it’s been weeks since that conversation. Feels like he is suddenly standing underwater, watching them swim above him. Feels like the only sunlight that reaches him is the one that gets through the spaces their bodies leave for him. 

*

In his dreams he is always falling.

*

His fingernails always bitten, his lips cracked. His shirts wrinkled on his body. He thinks of shaving his head, of getting new glasses. He thinks of the way he acts, of how cocky and selfish he makes himself be and kind of feels sick. He thinks of how everything he does is a pleading. He thinks of how much he wants to be loved without wanting to love back. He thinks he’d die to be needed and maybe that’s what he has to do. Maybe they’ll only miss him when he’s gone.

“Daniel?” Jack asks quietly, half out the window, leaning into the fire escape, looking at him. “You look like you’re going to jump.”

Daniel scoffs, smiles, shakes his head.

“It’s too loud inside,” he answers though he’s lying. Really, it’s too quiet inside. He can hear them talking through the walls of his room and their muffled voices feel like they’re pulling at his skin and his room feels too big and he wonders where he’ll go after all of this is over. 

Below him, the city looks cold and unwelcoming and Daniel only really has a place in it if he’s doing magic but after all of this is over he might not be able to anymore. It’s hard not to think about it when he’s left alone.

“Just don’t jump, ok? We still kind of need you,” Jack says and moves away from the window, leaves it open, leaves Daniel on the fire escape in a city that could be theirs soon.

“Okay, kid,” Daniel answers though he doubts Jack hears him. He looks down at his hands, cracks his fingers. Ignores how cold he’s gotten while he’s been here.

*

He thinks of how there’s a moment after he comes home when he’s turning on the hallway light before he locks the door and how he always thinks he’s the most vulnerable in those moments. He thinks of how he’s the most vulnerable in front of them, quietly asking them to leave space for him. Quietly hoping they want him there as much as he does. His fingers toying nervously with his sleeve. He thinks of how he’s the most vulnerable calling the apartment they share home, calling them home like there is nowhere else he can go. 

*

It’s not like he wants them to love him. He doesn’t really know what he wants from them, if he’s honest. He doesn’t know why out of all the people that left Henley is the one he never forgot. In high school there was a boy and Daniel, at the age of fifteen, thought they were soulmates. He struggles to remember his name nowadays. He struggles to remember most names. His own too, sometimes.

Merritt notices when he zones out before Jack or Henley do. It’s not surprising, but it makes Daniel feel fuzzy and weird. He wants to feel his bones sometimes. Bites down on nothing but air. Dreams of touching his clavicles. Thinks of how they mean much more to him than he does to them. Wonders what sounds his fingers would make if he broke them one by one.

“Your heart is on the cards,” Henley says once. She also calls Jack a humming bird. It gets all tangled up in his head. Your heart is on the birds, Henley says and she catches Jack humming and she’s right.

“With a name like Atlas,” Merritt says once and he doesn’t finish the thought. Or, Daniel doesn’t think he does, but he gets it anyway. The world is on his shoulders sometimes and everything feels like it is slipping through his fingers and the thought of losing control scares him more than anything else does. They scare him more than anything else does. Or they don’t, but the idea of loving them does. Jack falls asleep with his head in Henley’s lap and she smiles down at him, takes off her gloves to run her fingers through his hair and both Merritt and Daniel stay quiet, pretend not to watch them. Merritt moves closer to him, in a way that doesn’t seem like he realizes he’s doing it. Daniel looks at the cards in his hands and tries not to smile. They gravitate towards each other. 

*

He used to make her wear red for the shows. It never looked good on her, he thinks, but he made her do it anyway. His hands in handcuffs and her in front of him, with a red jacket, he thinks he’d follow her to hell and then, later, his hands free and her hair like flames in the wind and Jack and Merritt next to him, he thinks he won’t have to, but he still would if it meant staying with them.

On the plane, he fidgets with his hands and then he fixes his hair over and over and he fixes his shirt and reties his shoes and he’s awfully nervous. He watches Jack looking through the window and he watches Merritt and Henley laugh at each other and he knows what he has to do, has known it for a year but it doesn’t help the anxiety that climbs up his throat and then he is standing up, messing up Jack’s hair and repeating words that he’s practiced for months and he knows how to do this part so he breathes and Henley holds his gaze when he looks at her.

There is no time to stop. Jack fakes his death and they drive to the second hideout and they repeat the lines they know by heart and while they wait for the news to announce Jack’s death, Daniel curls up on the floor Henley and Merritt walk around him and then Merritt picks him up and Henley says, the way she used to say before his shows:

“Come on, Danny,” soft and quiet and so _her_ it makes him forget where he is and what they are doing and then he is up on his feet and Merritt turns off the tv before they drive to steal the fake safe.

He works on autopilot now. Henley says there’s no one she’d rather do this with and on stage he tunes out the crowd to listen to her and Merritt only and then they’re jumping off a roof and it all comes back to him at once and his body suddenly feels like there is something more trapped in his skin and he feels his hands more than he feels anything else and he thinks of how he wants it to rain and then Henley tells him to hurry up and he follows her because what else is he supposed to do, it’s been like this for as long as he’s known her.

For a year they’ve done nothing but wait for this and then it’s over in a flash and they’re standing in front of a fence waiting for Jack to let them in and then they’re letting their cards fall together and meeting Dylan for the first time without anything standing between them and he looks earnest and happy, the way they are happy and then he’s leading them to a carousel like they are kids and Daniel feels like maybe they are, like the last time he was this happy he was twelve years old and showing his first magic trick to his mother. Henley holds his hand for a second before she jumps and he is once again chasing after her and he’s chasing after Jack and Merritt this time too and maybe he hasn’t really felt alive before or at least he thinks he hasn’t and they are suddenly the center of his universe.

*

She kisses him first, perfect and anticipated, her hands soft on his face and he kisses her back, hands almost on her waist but not quite. He’s too afraid to find it’s all an illusion so he doesn’t touch her where she’s not already touching him. She kisses Merritt next, kisses Jack. She has always known what she wanted from them and they are too smitten not give all of themselves completely.

For awhile, it works. It works with Merritt kissing him with Daniel’s back against the counter in their new hideout and it works with Jack, still half asleep, kissing the corner of Henley’s mouth. It works on the roof of another building and in dark alleys leading to nowhere, works when Jack’s shaving Daniel’s hair for him, telling him about the tricks he wants to learn, works when Daniel can't fall asleep and Merritt reads to him, his voice calm and soothing and hypnosis doesn't work on Daniel but he understands how it does on others. Works when they're playing card games on the cold wood floor and Jack always wins and they let him, pretend they don't notice he always cheats. Works when Dylan calls and they decide not to answer, just for now, because they’re still in bed, all four of them, half on top of each other. For awhile being with them is his big magic trick.

And then there’s-

A call. Henley shouldn’t have kept her personal phone but she did. So there’s a call. A voice. There’s a hospital and Henley’s mother is sick and Henley won’t unlock the bathroom door while she’s crying and Jack sits on the other side of it and talks to her even though she won’t answer and then there’s another call and Henley, angry in the middle of the living room, telling Dylan that _no, she won’t wait, it’s her mother, for fucks sake_ and Merritt trying to calm her down and Daniel, lost and restless, feeling like his body is once again too big for him. 

When he reaches out to touch her, she flinches away and breaks the illusion he’s been so desperate to keep. And then, like all those years ago, she packs her bags and stands in the doorway for a moment too long like there is something she wants to say and doesn’t.

His card, like an insult, stares at him from his hands. He’s a product tester again.


End file.
